"Elegant, soothing, frantic, turbulent"
Brian Wise and I have both enthused in the past about the Australian Art Orchestra's musical-visual production Testimony, staged at last year's Sydney and Melbourne festivals. This CD recalls an earlier triumph for pianist-composer Paul Grabowsky and several of his colleagues from the ranks of the AAO, in the musical-theatrical production The Theft of Sita which was produced for the Adelaide and Melbourne festivals in 2000, and subsequently travelled to Europe and the USA.
Sita - a rare collaboration between musicians and composers from Australia and Indonesia - documents the music for that production. The composers were Grabowsky and I Wayan Gde Yudane, joined by John Rodgers (violin), Ren Walters (guitar), Shelley Scown (voice), Sandy Eans (saxophones), Niko Schauble (drums) and Adrian Sherriff (bass trombone, flute). Grabowsky plays electronics and prepared piano, effectively changing the instrument's sound to blend in with the instruments of the gamelan ensemble. Yudane is joined by I Made Subandi, I Gusti Putu Sudarta, I Ketut Lanus and I Made Gde Mandra. Between them, they play such instruments as gender (similar to a steel xylophone) rebob (a two-stringed violin), kendang (drum) and bumbong (a bamboo percussion instrument), as well as contributing wordless vocals on some tracks
It is fascinating to study the way the two ensembles variously merge or contrast with each other. The music is very descriptive: by turns elegant, soothing, frantic, turbulent, even jarring in its depiction of violent conflict. But it stands up in its own right, without the lighting and shadow puppets to play out the narrative. Titles like 'Jatayu Battle', 'Song of Desolation' and 'Lament' let you know where the story is heading.
Scown's pure soprano is especially effective on the tracks where she appears (such as on a setting from 'Ecclesiastes', which some may recognise as the basis for the Byrds hit 'Turn Turn Turn'). But all of the participants deserve full credit for making this such a strikingly successful cross-cultural collaboration.
- Rhythms (Adrian Jackson), March 2003
